Reducing Online Hate Speech
Learning Goals:
- Explain how social norms can control whether prejudice is expressed
- Explain the difference between normative and empirical expectations
Motivation:
Rather than change attitudes, maybe we can change behaviors.
People can still be prejudiced, but they may not act on or express those prejudices if they know that such behavior is counter-normative.
A Simple Example: (not) smoking in certain places
Elements of social norms
Social norms spell out what we should (or should not) do in certain situations.
In other words, they are beliefs / expectations about how others think we ought to behave.
Some people call these beliefs “injunctive norms” or simply “normative expectations”.
Examples:
- Don’t litter
- Dress up for church
- Speak Dutch in Dutch shops (when Dutch shoppers are around)
- Work hard and get a good education (esp. if you are an immigrant)
As we have seen in a previous class (week 6), one consequence of the existence of a social norm is that norm violations will be sanctioned. People are therefore usually keen to avoid violating norms (at least when others can see them).
This might explain why election polls often under-estimate support for far-right political candidates – that is, people who actually plan to vote for the far-right on election day are embarassed to reveal their true voting intentions to pollsters.
Another Example of How Norms Can Constrain the Expression of Prejudice
(from Vicente Valentim)
In Spain, people vote using voting cards:
To preserve privacy, voters usually make their selection in private booths.
But in one municipality, 4 elections were held on the same day, and they ran out of voting booths! Thus, for one out of the 4 elections, voters had to pick up their cards from a public table (making their votes potentially observable by others).
When voting was potentially public, people were significantly less likely to support the far-right Partido Popular.
Normative compliance
Just because a social norm exists doesn’t guarantee that people will follow it, or that norm violations will be sanctioned.
Example: you know littering is wrong, but…
Normative compliance depends crucially on the belief that others are also following the norm.
Some people use the term “descriptive norms” or “empirical expectations” to refer to these beliefs about others’ behavior .
To summarize:
- Injunctive norms (or normative expecations) are our beliefs about
what others think we should do
- i.e. we believe that most people think that littering is wrong
- Descriptive norms (or empirical expectations) are our beliefs about
what others actually do
- i.e. we believe that most people do (not) litter
These two sets of beliefs need not coincide!
Consider: in many countries, most people think that corruption is wrong. Yet lots of people are corrupt anyways! Indeed, the fact that other people are violating the honesty norm gives me license / justification to also break the rules.
Norms against hate speech
Even internet trolls know that most people find hate speech socially unacceptable.
So there’s no point in trying to change anyone’s beliefs about injunctive norms.
This leaves us with two options for reducing hate speech:
- Sanction norm violations (e.g. counter-speaking)
- Changing beliefs about whether other people also engage in hate speech online (e.g. censoring)
Alvarez and Winter experiment
Message Board
Design
Censored Treatment
Counterspeaking Treatment
